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I think it's clear that rental properties should exist, because however much it sucks that some people can't buy a property to live in, it would suck a lot harder if the only way to live somewhere was to buy it.

If rental properties should exist, who should own them? If renting of housing by private owners is banned, that's a small inconvenience for people who might be combining households (each partner lived apart initially and now want to move in together) or when otherwise taking a temporary assignment somewhere with the intention to return, but that's not the bulk of rental property pretty obviously.

I think the greater challenge is that prospective home buyers are competing against other prospective home buyers. All else being equal, people earning a 25th percentile income and having a 25th percentile savings are going to lose out in a competitive bidding situation to people with a 26th percentile income and savings.

Not sure how you came to think I said rental should not exist.

I think governments should regulate to ensure housing markets are fair, with a primary goal of ensuring people who want to own a house can buy one.

I fundamentally believe that it should be within the means of anyone who wants to own a house to have one. That means firefighters, kindergarten teachers, garbage collection workers, receptionists, old and young people - all those people who frankly have zero chance right now.

Governments should use they tools they have to discourage monopoly style property hoarding.

Housing should not be used at hotel rooms - I disagree with the cored concept of AirBNB because residential housing should be for the ordinary lives of citizens,m not for investors to make money from travel holidays. Things like AirBNB distort the market.

I am against residential housing being sold to non citizens/permanent residents.

Rather than worry about hoarding, what if it was just easier to build more of it? Look at zoning in SF bay area. Or Sydney.

Ahhh, the old "supply is the solution!" response.

"More supply will solve insane pricing!" is what governments and property investors like to say. It sure sounds plausible - sounds like market economics doesn't it..... if there's so much of something on the market that supply outstrips demand then prices MUST go down, right?

Seems like a ridiculous idea to me that so many houses will be built that prices will crash down to the level that anyone can buy them.

In fact I think what happens when there is more supply is that investors buy more houses to put renters into.

It will never happen that so many houses will be built that they become so cheap that the pricing will crash.

Property developers love to say "more supply!" because it makes them more money, that's all - they know more supply will never drives prices down so much that anyone could afford a house.

>> Seems like a ridiculous idea to me that so many houses will be built that prices will crash down to the level that anyone can buy them

There is an entire history of business where that exact thing happens (assuming anyone isn't literal). Watch the markets for energy (increased drilling causes prices to drop), metals (mines come online, prices drop), ag commodities... and real estate. There was a massive overbuild in the US during the late 90's and early 2000s, which resulted in a big drop in prices.

See here:

https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/housing-starts#:~....

The US needed around 1-1.2 million houses to cover new household formation during that period. Massive overbuild. Now look at prices:

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/ASPUS

Notice the dip after there had been a build up of supply? Prices dropped about 30%. Then notice the shortage of building for several years... and a run up in prices shortly after? The old supply and demand...

Just using common sense - land is a gigantic part of the cost of a house. If zoning laws made it such that you can build more units on a given piece of land...how could prices do anything but go down?

The old "supply is the solution" is old because it has been true since the beginning of humans buying and selling things.

It's not a theoretical question, but a practical question of relative magnitudes. Can we actually supply enough housing to stabilize prices? And let's say we did, perhaps a great cost, but then what happens in the next big demographic shift? And what of the environmental impact in the process?

The "direct" solution is not always the best. This line of thinking always reminds me of the approach to medicine where they'd rather cut out your gallbladder than put you on an elimination diet and send you to an acupuncturist.

Given that there are many areas of the US where there is enough housing for houses to be affordable by the barely or not-quite middle class, it seems like that is possible. Detroit, Pittsburgh, Buffalo, Memphis, Oklahoma City, Kansas City, Richmond, New Orleans, Cincinnati, Columbus, Cleveland, Philly and lots of the surrounding suburban and rural areas.

Those statistics above aren't theoretical, it's empirical data, and prices went down 30%.

> In fact I think what happens when there is more supply is that investors buy more houses to put renters into.

Solve that with more supply. Those people only have finite money. We can keep building inexpensive housing and selling it to them at insane prices for longer than they can keep buying them at insane prices.

The problem is that, once we break them, then we almost certainly overshoot. The price seriously craters, and everyone who bought a house in the last N years takes a huge bath.

This is basically the housing market. Homebuilders react to high prices by continuing to build more homes as long as they can do so at a profit. Not hard to understand. There is always overshooting. That's OK, it results in a lot of homes.

Those who complain that there isn't enough housing are complaining that they are being priced out of popular areas. It's like complaining you can't afford a BMW and have to stick with an old Ford. Housing in the U.S. is still available and home ownership rates are relatively high.

The problem is that well-paid jobs are scarce, and getting scarcer, which puts a lot of pressure on housing in the handful of areas that have well-paid jobs. But that's not a problem with the national housing market, but the local markets in hot regions, which are captive to local zoning laws in those markets. Again, not something homebuilders can address easily.

I wish people would stop talk about housing problems and instead focus on the distribution-of-jobs problem. Housing is never going to be fast enough to catch up to a hot jobs market area, and it will always end up overshooting. Moreover, as a nation, we need well paid jobs to be much more geographically diverse if we are to survive as something other than pockets of wealth surrounded by vast regions of poverty.

Agree with a lot of this, but the zoning problems are real. They can't be fixed by homebuilders (of any type) and local governments face perverse incentives on the issue, so it can only be solved at a state level (US). In other jurisdictions it's likely similar.

I agree that the pains of restrictive zoning are very real and punish newcomers. When I was in SF, I lived in a rent controlled unit in which there was a cranky old lady paying $800 for a 2 bedroom apartment while a young couple moved into a smaller unit in the same building and were paying $3000. They were planning on having a child, but it was really hard. Both working full time just to afford rent. That's what happens when you freeze housing supply.

But the usual counterweight is to move to areas with more liberal zoning -- e.g. zoning is locally controlled and if a city wants to stop growing, then there's not much that can be done to stop them - California is trying, but there is a lot of opposition to forcing cities to grow if they don't want to.

The solution is to not build a major corporate HQ in such a city, or to move the HQ to cities that embrace growth -- which is the majority. But if that doesn't happen, then good jobs only exist in areas with restrictive zoning, and that's what makes the zoning painful.

Yup, agree. Houston is a good example.

It's a bit of a chicken and egg though.

We know what happens when the high-paying jobs become more geographically distributed. We saw it in Portland and Austin in the past few decades, for example: people are drawn to those places from California and housing prices go up significantly.

People do that to escape the high prices in California -- but by doing so, they cause prices to increase in the places they move to, because doing so creates a sudden influx of demand from buyers who have more spending power than the people who already lived there.

If the housing supply had been increased in California, fewer people would be flooding into Austin from California to buy houses.

If supply and demand does not explain housing prices, then why was housing ever affordable?

> when there is more supply is that investors buy more houses to put renters into.

Where would the investors create these new renters from?

Immigration and net-new household formation are two sources. (If rental properties are cheaper, people might move out of their parents house earlier, might take fewer [possibly zero] roommates, or might move to a location because the rent is cheap. All of those factors seem quite small compared to a contemplated large increase in housing supply. However, you can only make so many new households by driving the price of rent down. At some point, either new households stop being able to soak up the supply or investors aren't willing to keep pushing the price of rentals down.)

Turn the problem around. If we assume as a given that some people can't afford houses at the level of supply that currently exists, does not increasing the supply help those hopeful buyers at all?

What if we built a trillion houses; in your imagination, would all that housing still be expensive? Would each one have a tenant?

>I am against residential housing being sold to non citizens/permanent residents.

How to say xenophobic without saying it.. Any tax payer should be treated equally..

Assuming the most logical reading of that is (non-(citizens/permanent residents)), those are mostly all tax payers [either current or near-future].

I agree it's abhorrent xenophobic policy if meant to be ((non-citizens)/(permanent residents)), but I read it as naturally meaning the other.

It's xenophobic either way.

Yeah it's really not, it's about trying to keep the housing market about housing the local population rather than allowing in investor funds from overseas which warps it, changes what gets built at what price, and drives people into rental rather than ownership.

If you don't have the right to live somewhere, why should you be competing in the housing market and pricing out the local population?

Particularly if the nature of your competition is to keep properties mostly empty while speculating on price (see, for example, a lot of the high-end apartment development in London).

It's not xenophobia, it's a fundamental disagreement in what housing is actually for.

No, it's a fundamental agreement about what property rights are really for.

Not everyone agrees that property rights are absolute or supreme. Some of us think markets should be set up to help people, not the other way around, particularly where human needs like housing are involved.

It's certainly not clear that a preference for housing people over capital is 'xenophobic'.

Xenophobic - what a load of garbage. It's well known that countries have policies on whether or not foreign buyers are allowed to buy residential real estate. Me having an opinion on that does not make me xenophobic.

>>Any tax payer should be treated equally..

Foreign buyers are not taxpayers in Australia/Canada/USA.

"The Prohibition on the Purchase of Residential Property by Non-Canadians Act (Act) comes into force on January 1, 2023. It prohibits the purchase of residential property in Canada by non-Canadians unless they are exempted by the Act or its regulations, or the purchase is made in certain circumstances specified in the regulations."

https://www.bennettjones.com/Blogs-Section/Canadas-Ban-on-Fo...

In Australia and Canada, Chinese money has flooded our real estate markets - much of that money is anecdotally said to be the gains of corrupt officials and people trying to exit the country due to the oppressive regime.

"Chinese investors flooding billions into the Australian real estate market prompt money laundering fears"

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-10-12/chinese-investors-flo...

This outflow of capital from China, pouring into Australia and Canada pushes up prices, meaning that people who are not citizens or permanent residents are buying local real estate and inflating prices. Every house owned by a non citizen/permanent resident means one more that cannot be bought by a citizen/permanent resident.

Why should people from other countries be entitled to own our residential real estate? If you believe the purpose of housing is to house the citizens and permanent residents then there's every reason to close out foreign buyers, as Canada has done:

https://www.immigration.ca/canada-foreign-buyer-ban-starting...

https://www.cwilson.com/not-for-sale-canada-closes-the-door-...

"Demand for U.S. homes from foreign investors is pushing up home prices, exacerbating concerns over housing affordability"

"Housing markets are preferred destinations for foreign investors looking for yields, vacation homes or safe havens, or for those dodging tax restraints and corruption crackdowns in their home countries. But demand for U.S. homes from foreign investors, especially Chinese, pushes up home prices, exacerbating concerns over housing affordability, according to new research from Wharton."

https://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/foreign-purchase...

> This outflow of capital from China, pouring into Australia and Canada pushes up prices

My family in Australia (locals) complain about this all the time as well - chinese money flooding in and making it unaffordable for them.

They own 14 properties between the 5 of them.

If you want to prevent foreign investments, then say so. Why say non-citizens and permanent residents? In a multi-cultural society like US, non-citizens and permanent residents do form a significant portion of the population and they also need place to live.

Pointing to foreign investment is a strawman argument as the original poster called for banning non-citizens and permanent residents.. not non-residents.

Anyone who is not a citizen or a permanent resident is a foreign buyer - that's how the legislation defines it.

What about people in US on H1-B visas?

Who would own these rentals if not the landlords/rich?

Rental property will always exist. We need to completely ban nightly rentals. If you want to operate a hotel, build and operate a hotel. If a community was built to operate with nightly rentals, like, say, Sun River, OR, then perhaps they can zone appropriately for nightly rentals. Pseudo hotels should not be operating in traditional neighborhoods.

So instead of having a residential building with Airbnbs inside you'll now have a hotel. How does that solve the issue?

If there's X number of people who need an overnight stay in the city and you want to accommodate them - what difference it makes if they stay in residential studios or hotel rooms?

What you're saying resonates with me intuitively and anecdotally, but it's hard to square with the historical overall US homeownership rate, which peaked right before the Great Recession: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/RHORUSQ156N

Is there other data available that supports your view?

If nobody is building real estate, how do prices do anything but go up? From a supply side perspective, real estate has always been about financials. Everyone is trying to make money. Zoning rules make it harder to build more... and hence there isn't more...

You must be the house owner somehow reading into my comments as "no-one should build real estate".

Your exact quote was I hate it that people "buy and build a fair bit of real estate on the side". Their interpretation of your comments is quite straightforward.

>> but I hate it that people "buy and build a fair bit of real estate on the side"

Just reading.

Yeah that isn't me saying "no-one should build real estate".

Preach it brother/sister. Everyone is out here treating real estate as an investment and inserting themselves pointless middle-people extracting capital from those who are blocked from entering the housing market or even scaling their living situation to match their family requirements.

It's incredibly depressing to see comments like yours considered "wrong" and in the minority and even more so vociferously defended against in the name of "small-business owners" or the "capitalism IS fair" crowd. Despite those who succeeded being a survivorship bias group.

Housing is a right, and should not be an investment. To invest in housing alienates its purpose which is stability and shelter. It creates an antagonistic lens in which its ownership is held, not for those housed and protected by it, but those who wish to squeeze as much blood from the stone it has become.

> Housing is a right,

If we accept that as true, then let the state build minimal housing for those who cannot afford shelter.

TBH, that still won't take away the buy-to-rent investors, because people will still want better housing than the state provides.

The state/city could nationalize apartment blocks easily and and provide cheap or free housing to those who want it (not means tested, you want somewhere to live but don't want to deal with a landlord? Here's your state housing).

This will provide a floor for landlords to compete against and keep prices down.

The state/city could nationalize cars from car rental companies easily and and provide cheap or free cars to those who want it

The state/city could nationalize restaurants easily and and provide cheap or free food to those who want it

The state/city could nationalize Apple easily and and provide cheap or free iPhones to those who want it

Seems like we found the solution /s

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